Everything is just fine, except that I am completely unable to record audio, either using the built-in microphone or an external one. I can do this under Windows 7, which was installed in the laptop by Dell.

Audio output is ok, both for the built-in speakers and the external headset. I can listen to my mp3 in mpd/ncmpcpp and watch (HD) movies at youtube, for example.

However, as I have already mentioned, audio input is not ok. Following advice I found at Archlinux, Ubuntu and Suse forums, I have run alsaconf and I changed /etc/modprobe.d/sound:

I have then tried to record sound using sox (rec) and arecord applications. Both of them returned perfectly (and annoyingly) clean WAV files. :( I've also given Ekiga a try but it didn't work either, as expected.

Afterwards, I have tried several different alsamixer configurations for my capture devices and tried to record sound both via the builtin microphone and via an external one. It was all to no avail. Here are two screenshots of (rather obvious testing) configurations that I attempted: